EMERGENCY! REPUBLICAN VOTER TAMPERING: COULD BARACK OBAMA SEE MCCAIN and PALIN STEAL THE ELECTION ? OH – AND A CHANCE FOR LAWYERS TO DO SOMETHING REALLY GOOD

Rolling_stone_cover_2Could a vast network of voter challenges (here’s help), especially toward young, newly registered and African-American voters (purges of voter rolls, craven voter challenges and other tough-to-prove but disruptive tactics) reduce votes for Barack Obama and endanger a fair election?  Despite their efforts to tar Obama-related registration efforts, it appears that the truly dangerous activities — and those most likely to tip this election away from what appears to be the public will — are emerging from Republican operations.  For example, on Super Tuesday in Las Vegas, "nearly 20% of the county’s voters were absent from the rolls."  As one voting rights expert declared:

I don’t think the Democrats get it," says John Boyd, a voting-rights
attorney in Albuquerque who has taken on the Republican Party for
impeding access to the ballot. "All these new rules and games are
turning voting into an obstacle course that could flip the vote to
the GOP in half a dozen states.

There are several "games" and they’re tough to control because they come from so many different points of origin.  Robert Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast, in the most recent issue of Rolling Stone,  describe in horrifying detail (and no this is not hyperbole… it really is horrifying), how these vulnerabilities could play out.   You can check on violations in your state here.   Their account of the basics from across the U.S.:

  1. Obstructing voter registration drives:  stringent and unreasonable state laws have intimidated many registration efforts, including those of the non-partisan League of Women Voters.  Oh – and in Florida they’ve ignored the law that food stamp recipients be offered registration opportunities when they apply for benefits.  Those registrations, 120,000 during Clinton, are just 10,000 today.
  2. "Perfect matches"  Suppose I signed my voter registration form "Cynthia K. Samuels" and my driver’s license "Cynthia Samuels."  That’s not a perfect match and in some states I could be disqualified.
  3. Purging legitimate voters from the rolls: "All told, states reported scrubbing at least 10 million voters
    from their rolls on questionable grounds between 2004 and 2006.
    Colorado holds the record: Donetta Davidson, the Republican
    secretary of state, and her GOP successor oversaw the elimination
    of nearly one of every six of their state’s voters.
    "  The toughest thing about this one is that you don’t find out you’ve been purged until you get to the polling place, and then it’s tough to get help.  It is wise for voters to check their status with their local election officials in advance of election day,
  4. Requiring "unnecessary" voter IDs:  Young and minority voters (more often Obama voters), according to Kennedy and Palast, often do not have either driver’s licenses or state-issued IDs.  Without them, their legitimacy is often questioned.
  5. "Spoiled" ballots:  Blank spaces, tears that make the ballot tough for voting machines to count, or weird little extra marks can disqualify a voter.  Since minority and less-affluent neighborhoods get the crumbiest, oldest voting machines, they are disproportionately affected by this factor.
  6. Problems with provisional ballots:  If our voter gets to the polls, and is challenged, federal law requires that, rather than being turned away, the challenged voter be given a "provisional" ballot – one that is supposed to be counted once the voter has been determined to be legitimate.  HOWEVER there’s no way to track them – or to be sure they ever entered the vote count. In 2004, according to Rolling Stone, a third of all provisional ballots – maybe as many as a million – were thrown out.

In addition to the Rolling Stone piece, take a look at Salon’s review of hot spots.  For example:

Voter suppression can be difficult to prove. Suppression tactics —
anything from purging voter rolls under suspicious circumstances to
using various justifications to question the eligibility of potential
voters — are often the product of legal gray areas being exploited at
the hands of local partisan officials. To date, no one has presented
evidence of any nationally organized effort by the Republican Party to
suppress Democratic votes. But there is little doubt that at local and
regional levels — in some potentially critical states on the electoral
map — there has been dubious activity that could result in the
disenfranchisement of voters who would likely punch the ballot for
Barack Obama.

This has happened before – and in many ways the Federal law passed in response to the 2000 election debacle makes it easier.  Despite the new commitment in both the young and minority communities, local officials can challenge and prevent election day votes that may never be recovered.  The young, the black and the poor are most likely to be affected – and that, of course, means, largely, potential Democratic voters, usually challenged in ways very difficult to recover.  There is, however, a group called Election Protection providing resources all over the country.  Not much we civilians can do – but if you are an attorney or law student or paralegal, please sign up to help .  Your help on election day could count at least as much as — and in battleground states maybe more than — your vote.
 

FORTY YEARS AGO IN 1968: BOBBY KENNEDY AND WHAT CAME AFTER

Rfk_bw_2By the time Robert Kennedy decided to run for President, in March of 1968, just days after Eugene McCarthy’s great New Hampshire primary showing  demonstrated President Lyndon Johnson’s weakness and the real unpopularity of the Vietnam war, I was already neck-deep in McCarthy’s campaign.  I’d been involved since the summer before, in what, before McCarthy agreed to run, we called Dump Johnson.  When Allard Lowenstein (himself assassinated in 2000), recruited us for it at the 1967 National Student Association (NSA) meeting, he’d  say "You can’t beat somebody (LBJ) with nobody."  So he had worked very hard to get Bobby to run, but he refused. 

It was Gene McCarthy who agreed to stand for all of us against the Johnson administration and the war.  After NSA I organized the Smith campus.  We were among the first students to go each weekend to New Hampshire to work for McCarthy and against the war.  So when Kennedy announced, just days after our great New Hampshire triumph, that he would also run, we were devastated, and angry. 

Over the months of campaigning though, I came to have enormous respect for Senator Kennedy and his campaign.  There was no way to watch him without feeling the power of his connection with all kinds of Americans and his compassion, poetry and sense of justice.  This moment, just as an inner city Indianapolis neighborhood learned of the death of Martin Luther King, is typical of him at his best:
 

By June the campaign was tense; such an important issue and the two Senators were running against one another as well as (and sometimes, it seemed, instead of) the war.  Kennedy won Indiana.  McCarthy won Oregon.  We moved south to Los Angeles(one of many places I saw for the first time from a campaign bus) criss-crossing the state from Chico to San Francisco and back to LA.  Just before the midnight after the primary, as June 4, 1968, election day, became June 5, we knew we’d lost, so we went to Senator’s concession in the ballroom of the Beverly Hilton and then back upstairs to mourn.  We weren’t even watching the rest of coverage.  Suddenly, running through the halls of the staff floor of the hotel, one of McCarthy’s closest advisors shouted "Turn on the TV!  They’ve done it again!" 

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